The barriers to plastic alternatives have not historically been a lack of ideas. It's the combination of scale, stability and cost — all those things that have made plastic a success over the last century — that has prevented the implementation of those ideas.

WikiCells, an edible skin that takes the place of plastic packaging and protects the food or liquid within, moves past all of those obstacles.

"This may be the first scalable, inexpensive, stable packaging solution that fully eliminates plastic," said inventor David Edwards, a professor at Harvard University. "Beyond being edible, the reality is it's solving a major industry, health and environmental need today."

Here's where it started.

At Harvard, Edwards teaches a class called "How to Create Things and Have Them Matter." In the fall of 2008, Edwards gave his students the seed of an idea: To explore how a biological cell could help us think about carrying water more efficiently in drought-stricken parts of the world.

About a year later, the biomedical engineer, whose past ideas have led to imaginative creations like inhalable caffeine and breathable chocolate, realized the the rules of nature could also be applied to food packaging.

"Like a grape, you can't empty the inside of biological cell and have something left," says Edwards. "It made me wonder whether you could recreate packaging with that in mind and eliminate plastic."

Harvard professor and engineer David Edwards.

From there, Edwards contacted a designer in Paris, Francois Azambourg, and asked if he would like to work on the project. The first take on the WikiCell design was the Edible Bottle a concept that debuted at Le Leboratoire in Fall 2010. The French lab, located next to the Louvre in Paris, was founded by Edwards in 2007 for people to showcase experiments in art, design and science and invite the public to test them.

"At that point, the project was very hypothetical and curiosity-driven," Edwards said. "Yes, we were sensitive to the need of eliminating plastic and packaging, but it clearly wasn't the commercial notion; it was just a general, philosophical scientific design question."

Over the next two years, Edwards continued to test the limits of WikiCells: gazpacho soup wrapped in a tomato skin, a grape pouch filled with wine, and orange juice in an orange-flavored skin. In January 2012, the engineer presented the idea of WikiCells at Harvard. The talk generated immediate buzz culminating in the founding of WikiCells Designs, a startup based in Cambridge, Ma. The company's CEO is Robert Connelly. Ice cream housed in an edible shell is their first commercial product.